UPDATE: It turns out that this story is likely a hoax. But it says something that so many of us bought the story hook, line and sinker and that so many of our readers are willing to give one a taste. Maybe a poop burger isn’t so unlikely after all.

Some hardcore carnivores have a hard time finding meat alternatives such as soy protein or tofu burgers to be palatable. But non-meat eaters may lose their appetite along with their carnivorous friends over this one – a meat alternative made from HUMAN EXCREMENT. Yep, you heard me correctly — Japanese scientist Mitsuyuki Ikeda has developed a “burger” made from soya, steak sauce essence, and protein extracted from human feces. Hit the break for a video explaining the process!

Would you eat a turd burger?

The meatpacking industry causes 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the release of methane from animals. The livestock industry also consumes huge amounts of feed and water in relation to the amount of meat that it yields, and many find the industry to be inhumane and cruel to animals. These factors alone are reason enough for vegetarians to replace their meat intake with vegetable proteins and legumes. But Ikeda, a scientist at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama, sought to further the field of alternative proteins by recycling a form of protein-rich waste : sewage mud.

“Sewage mud” is exactly what you think it is – poop. Ikeda’s process begins by extracting protein and lipids from the “mud.” The lipids are then combined with a reaction enhancer, then whipped into “meat” in an exploder. Ikeda then makes the poop more savory, by adding soya and steak sauce.

Currently, the price of the poop burgers are 10-20 times that of regular meat, due to the cost of research, but he feels they will even out in a few years. He admits that “some people” may have a psychological aversion to eating artificial meat made of their own poop at first, but thinks many would be open to personally completing the food chain. He also notes that the burgers are extremely low in fat.

The artificial meat is low in fat and reduces waste and carbon emissions, however it’s hard to believe that any number of benefits could persuade consumers to take a bite out of a poop sandwich.

So this is a new version of what a cannibal is? Makes my stomach sick reading this. Is this for real. Never like oriental food dishes per se. In fact I like eating foods that I have prepared. How nasty can nasty get boils my stomach to say the least. Don't care if the protein from the shit is extracted to make the burgers.

The only nutrients of value for pigs in human feces would be plant material that humans ate but couldn't digest. Most of human feces would do nothing for the pigs, but it probably wouldn't harm them as long as they didn't eat too much of it.

In my home town in India,pigs regularly consume Human feces without any adverse health effect to them( to my knowledge) .Some people also consume their meat( pigs).With it I feel what has been done in Japan now ,is already being practiced in one town in India with a guilt feeling.I was wondering whether the above two feed back can help to solve
1.Sewage disposal problem ( wastage of water & pollution )
2.Food problem
3.Fuel shortage ( If these pigs are trained to be used as personal vehicles like horse & donkey )
Regards
prabhakar shandilya
[email protected]

from a scientific point of view, sounds great. just when you offer me one, don't tell me what it is! if it tastes normal, fine, if it doesn't taste normal, give it a fancy name. it doesn't really matter what the exact process is, we use fertilizer in gardens to grow vegtables.. but if you tell me is is a poop burger, my appetite will vanish, simple as that.

just want to say that the video says the protein comes from the bacteria that thrive in poop, not said poop. everyone has some bacteria on their feces when they poop but it'll multiply if you let it sit and i remember hearing about research being done on using bacteria in sewage to harvest their energy into a battery (but it takes shitloads to light up a tiny tiny bulb for one second). I probably wouldnt eat it but i won't say i wouldn't consider it for a while if the world runs out of cows.

Let's just remember this was just a proof-of-concept experiment. Presumably the human feces was collected in a lab via volunteers or something like that. If the process does go commercial, it's doubtful they would get the fecal material from sewage treatment plants precisely because of all the other stuff that sewage treatment plants get. Besides, almost all of these plants are under municipal or government control, so I doubt any of them would sell their effluent for food processing. The kind of scandal this would generate if it was done would be of the magnitude to get politicians thrown out of office.
For a commercial process you would have to keep the fecal matter separate from the point of collection through processing. This would be hard to do since most homes only have one sewage line to collect all fecal and garbage material.
What would be more likely is that this process would be used with beef and hog manure. From growing up on a farm I can tell you that this stuff is collected separately (though often with urine), and could be kept separate. It's also a huge waste disposal problem, so an alternative use for it would be welcome and farmers would actually invest money and effort in keeping it separate if it meant having a market for it. It's also possible that the process that extracts the proteins could keep out things such as urine salts, though I don't know.
As Edo says, water treated in sewage plants is released and later re-used as drinking water in many places in the US. The treatment process only removes solids and kills pathogens. Historically, these were the things that caused disease. When these processes were designed in the late 19th century, nobody thought much about trace contaminants (for example, there were no medicines back then to be excreted into the water). People were simply happy that they weren't dying at a young age from cholera and typhoid fever.
The water most of us drink today does contain dissolved salts, detergents, medicines, trace pesticides and herbicides, etc. It's not dangerous day-to-day. But even if it doesn't kill you over the long run, nobody knows the effect if has on our long-term health. There has been growing concern over this issue; studies are being done. At some point, we may require all drinking water be treated via reverse osmosis (RO) or some other method to remove the contaminants. This will be hugely expensive; it would certainly be too expensive to water your lawn or even wash your clothes with this water. If you're worried, my advice is to drink bottled water (even the stuff that is taken from municipal water supplies is heavily filtered and put through RO) or put in your own RO unit for your drinking water.

Assume for a moment that this article on burgers is not a hoax. Recycling waste has been going on for a long time. Sewage is a major source of energy, nonetheless, it contains myriad industrial waste products and vast numbers of various pharmaceutical wastes as well as loads of serious pathogens. All that would be needed to be removed. People in Orange County, California for example, drink recycled sewage effluent and so may those living in San Diego. This type of recycled water (less well treated and disinfected) is also used to irrigate vast acreages of leafy greens in California, some of which are certified organic. This area is the Salinas Valley in California, which some of you may remember from the spinach problem.
The problem with much of this is that the controlling standards under which such sewage byproducts are produced are antiquated and the tests used have a very limited scientific base for protecting public health. Our research group looked at the reclaimed water meeting all applicable state standards, but we used much more sophisticated tests. We found serious pathogens in the water that had just passed state standards. We are not alone in this. The industry's own research are found alarming levels of pathogens in state certified reclaimed water.
Now, translate that experience into other areas where sewage byproducts are created. How good are the standards and has the producing industry so co opted the regulators, as is the case with recycled water, that public health is placed as a distant second to profit? Is there any reason to suspect that the underlying standards for fecal burgers are any better? Serious testing is warranted.

If Ikeda is extracting the protein from sludge - the extraction of solid sewage from liquid sewage, that is a byproduct of waste water treatment plants - one must consider everything that is flushed down the toilets!!! Pharmaceuticals, womens sanitary items and condoms top the list - concerning items found in sludge. As a consumer, this concept seems too advanced for issues that need to be addressed before attempting to extract edible proteins from solid sewage or crap.

@sass: You're dealing with deep cultural taboos. People don't like to think about it. The truth is that manure is the oldest know fertilizer. Its molecules get taken up by plants such as corn and go right back into our food stream (though probably the manure is broken down more on the molecular level than the process this researcher uses). In many places in the US (mostly places that get their water from a river), what you flush down the toilet goes to a water treatment plant where the solids are removed, the bugs in the water are killed -- and the water gets put right back into the river for someone else to drink downstream. This water is perfectly safe to drink, but contains trace urine salts, detergents, etc., and has been in direct contact with feces and garbage. A lot of people would get sick if they realized this.

I don't understand why so many people are freaking out & choosing "no way" in the poll.. Did they not read that he's just extracting a protein from the feces? It's not like he's using the whole stool or anything :/

This could be for real. Back in the '70s a cattle operation down the road from us processed the cow manure and used it as a feed additive that it then fed back to the cattle. They were eventually shut down because trace amounts of arsenic that are normally present in feed began to accumulate because the manure was continuously recycled.

It's basically a very, very small version of the same food cycle nature uses to provide us with the beef in the first place. Add some energy from the sun, and your waste gets recycled into plants, cows, and then back into burgers. This just sidesteps a few steps in the process.
With that said, even knowing that, I'd still have a very, very hard time nerving myself up to even consider trying this.

It's really sad that everyone's acting like this is real. Does anyone know about the Yes Men's prank of the same exact order?? "Post Consumer Waste Recycling Program." Convincing World corporation leaders that recycling wealthy people's feces would be a great way to feed third world countries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP_nNemsNT8